Month: November 2005

Chap Percival has been blogging about some ongoing training for teachers in his Florida school district. One of the things he talks about is how the course is somewhat rushed and condensed. The teachers, many of whom are moving from Macs to PCs, are not getting a lot of hands on time. This seems to…

Do you have some students who want to learn Visual Basic .NET or C# on their own? Or perhaps you want to learn them as part of your own professional development. Well if so, Microsoft has a free series of lessons for absolute beginners. They look pretty good to me. I am sure that may…

Last week Brian Scarbeau installed a new departmental server at his school. He blogs about it here. One of the things he does that I think is great is that he involves his students in the process. They helped with the setup of the software and the migration of the data. And it turns out…

Arian Kulp has a simple time-tracking application. This little project creates an application that sits in the system tray and allows the user to collect information about how long one spends time on different tasks. Useful things demonstrated are: Creating an application for the system tray Handling time values Saving information in an XML dataset…

I wrote about gadgets for Windows Live about a week and a half ago. Today a friend of mine [thanks Daryll!] pointed me to a gadget creation starter kit for use with the Visual Wed Developer Express Edition. The gadget starter kit and the article that describe it are here. Take a look at it and…

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just published a Frequently Asked Questions list for student blogging. This is a document that I highly recommend that school administrators who are involved in student discipline read very carefully. The EFF is not the final arbiter of what is right and wrong of course but their FAQ is loaded…

The National Security Agency better known as the NSA has resources for students interested in codes and ciphers. If you have students interested in codes and ciphers (and a lot of students who like programming seem to also like those things) than this may be of interest to them. There are puzzles, games, and lots…

One of the things I struggled with as a teacher was getting students to understand the importance of a test plan. Not a plan on how to take a test, although that was a topic that came up with regards to the Advanced Placement Computer Science (APCS) exam. No, rather what students sometimes had trouble…

There is a lot of interest in dynamic languages these days. These languages are often used as scripting languages and people are doing a lot of rapid development with them. Python is one of those languages and is often listed as the “P” in LAMP along with PHP and Perl. Some people are using Python as…

A 15-year old girl from Puyallup won a recent Microsoft contest that looked for people using Windows XP in interesting ways. (News article here) Jeannine Johnson uses a computer and monitoring equipment on her dragster to check on its performance. I think there are a couple of interesting things here. There is the obvious message that…